Comus
by Rex Luscus
Summary: Remy LeBeau goes for a stroll during Mardi Gras, long before he'll ever hear of the X-Men. AU, Gambit/Nightcrawler.


Comus

by Rex Luscus

  
  


Disclaimer: Marvel owns these characters, not me. Cut and paste.

**Note:** This is a SLASH story. It is not explicit, but it is still SLASH. If that bothers you, spare yourself the anxiety and do not read it.

**Another note:** This story is also AU. It was written as part of a larger story which introduced Gambit and Nightcrawler to the movieverse, but that story didn't work out and this is all that's left. So bear in mind here that neither Gambit nor Nightcrawler has yet encountered the X-Men.

~~~

He leaned on the window sill, letting the breeze lift up his hair as the heat rose to him from the city below, carrying in its sweet heaviness the smell of cajun cooking and buttered popcorn, cotton candy and beer, and the acrid petroleum stench of civilization. It was heat created by the city itself, by the churning multitudes that flowed in to fill every cranny of the city's gentle, obliging architecture. The saturnalia wound its way along the street below, like a slow moving stream carrying in its sluggish flood its colorful flotsam--the bright orange of a tourist's cap, the parti-colored panoply of a papier mache costume decked in layers of feathers and sequins, the somber solid red of a band uniform, slashed with white and fringed with golden epaulets. He took a long pull on the joint, letting the last bit--all paper--crackle against his fingers, and after an eternity filled with the steady hum of the party that awaited him, released his lungful into the night air. It went like incense into the night, his libation to the spirit of the city. 

The riot of smells wafting up from the street was replaced by the powerful sweetness of the herb, moving like thick fluid into his sinuses and throat, settling like a cloud first over his senses, then over his mind as the chemical began to drag him out into the surf of fluxuating phenomena. Then, snaking its way up his spine, the desire to move seized him, to descend and enter the stream. 

He wove his way down the dark stairs and burst out into the street. Immediately, a blonde pony-tailed girl in an NYU tee-shirt--soaking wet, no bra--grabbed his hands and whirled him out onto the pavement. He laughed and went with her, tripping over the feet of passing tourists, unable to see her face--it was erased by the motion, turned to a cipher of hilarity, a feeling replacing an image. He joined her in gradually widening circles. 

Then suddenly he broke off and was flung, away from the gyre spun by the half-naked girl, and catapulted into another world, populated by new characters. Two men with matching plaid shirts and matching beer bottles nearly clotheslined him as they passed, arm in arm. He rolled forward between them, then sprang to his feet, the whole motion fluid and scripted, like a dream, as though a wire were pulling him through some wondrous course slowly revealing itself. A cluster of girls cheered as he completed his maneuver and he executed a dashing bow, barely even certain which way to direct it, before moving on. They called to him as he passed: 

"Hey, baby! Why don't you get rid o' that trench coat, huh?" 

He ignored them, answering: "Mes belles! La nuit, c'est jeune, n'est-ce pas?" 

He heard their shrieked replies behind him. Several pairs of breasts suddenly caught his attention, draped in loops of of glistening yellow, green, purple beads, and their owners were laughing at him as they passed and disappeared into the ever-moving flow of Bourbon Street. The flash of a camera suddenly exploded in his face, and he realized that the passing voices were talking about him. Something about his red eyes, no doubt. They thought he was dressed up for the carnival. 

Five towering figures appeared, pillars of yellow, red and purple, enormous, beautiful grotesques, like ponderous gods. Their smiling, painted heads bobbed slowly in blessing to him as they passed. He watched the flood carry them away like garish toys tossed into a river, teetering, dipping, ever-smiling in frozen ecstasy as they slipped away. 

He stopped and let the noise rush past him, the sounds of the city like the sounds of wind in a high, hollow place. People laughed and stumbled, bits of conversation drifted by, and a single nude girl ran, spirit-like, a flash of real motion, before she too disappeared. His buzz was finally beginning to wear off. He began to think it was time to go looking for a drink. 

Suddenly, something leapt out at him, a thing of brilliant color. A carnival character, a blue demon, laughing, bright yellow eyes dancing. It grabbed his hands and spun him around, like that first girl had done. He went with it, drawn to its wicked beauty, heedless of embarrassing himself in front of the young man that was no doubt underneath. But then he noticed the hands he was holding. They weren't human. They had less fingers, he thought; they weren't quite right. He stared into the glowing yellow eyes, and suddenly the menace of the bacchanalic frenzy around him began to press in. 

The creature--whatever it was--drew him in a circle, its face lit up joyously. It was a young man, he was fairly certain, but it was something else as well. A long, wicked devil's tail--a living one, not a piece of a costume--snaked around its knees, whipping around as they spun. He was starting to feel dizzy--the ganja was starting to make him nauseous. The demon creature drew him closer, so that they were suddenly turning in a more intimate dance than before. 

It had fur--soft, silky fur like a rabbit's--and up close he could see the dull glint of two fangs behind its dark blue lips. He immediately thought of vampires, the commercial stock in trade of New Orleans and its peculiar brand of macabre sexuality, dripping in the allegedly debauched heat of the Creole bayou. He suddenly had the thought that this thing, this inhuman man dancing with him, was somehow the spirit of the carnival, the real thing behind the overexposed image, behind all the commercialism and tourism and soft-core vampire novels, the dark genius of the place that stood in the shadows and laughed at all the college students dressing up just like it, unaware that it watched them. There was real power in this place. The festival, so cheapened by the modern clone, was still there beneath the surface, awaiting its moment to spring, in all its savage, joyful anarchy, onto the back of its feeble imitation. And the festival, what was it? It was heat, it was life, it was sex. It was the humid, dizzy ecstasy of anonymous union, the anonymity of being commonly human, when we cast off names like clothes. The demon--or the young man, whichever it was--felt hot and vital, gripping his hands, which he held pressed to their sides, with the insistence of an unshakable urge. The dark face drew closer, eerie yellow eyes burning like sparks, white fangs catching light from the lanterns constellating the street, and Remy felt like he was looking straight into the other world as hot, moist lips caught his. 

The kiss felt never-ending--deep, liquid, all-encompassing. His senses blurred together as his stirring fatigue was beaten away by adamant desire. The demon-man's arms were around him; it kissed him with full abandon, like a thing of nature, unwise to any rules of decorum, and thoughts of inhibition seemed alien, nonsensical. Its tongue was warm and sweet and impossibly long and flexible--all the more proof that it was some kind of incubus; its body seemed _made_ for this kind of pleasure. Remy's hands explored its very human body, though that extraordinary tail kept confounding his sense that it was in fact a human being he was holding. Their two bodies blended together, and the tail caressing the back of his leg stopped marking the boundary between human and inhuman, and seemed instead to draw him further into this dream of the supernatural, this nocturnal, erotic visitation. Those strange, too-few-fingered hands crept under his coat, searching out the secret details of his own youthful body. Desire bloomed in his belly and raced out to the furthest reaches of his self, consuming his insides like flame curling through paper. Finally, after what seemed like years, the creature broke away, and faded into the crowd. 

Remy stumbled on his way, dazed. As soon as it had begun, it had ended. Had it happened at all? Or was that some tourist he's grabbed, who'd been magically transformed by the cannabis? Drugs had never done anything like _that_ to him before, certainly. He was suddenly bothered by the anonymous press of humanity, so filled with drunk tourists and college students and perfectly ordinary individuals. None of them had that incredible pulsing energy, that otherworldly animation. He realized somewhat belatedly that he had a tremendous erection; he hadn't really felt his arousal except as a state of his entire body, something outside his body even. He wanted to get off now, to go home and get off, in the cramped, humid privacy of his second-storey apartment. He would turn on the fan, take off his clothes, grab a beer, and jerk off. Then he'd go to sleep and wake up in the morning, to the stale stench of urine in densely littered streets filled with clear, real, perfectly ordinary light. 

~~END~~


End file.
